The race to create a 'smart' Google — Everything you buy online says a little bit about you. And if all those bits get put into one big trove of data about you and your tastes? Marketer's heaven. Fortune's Jeffrey O'Brien reports. — The setup — (Fortune Magazine) …

Webshots Adds Video — CNet's photosharing service Webshots is adding video sharing capabilities today, something that has been expected since at least August when the service underwent a drastic redesign. There's not a lot of information on the site yet about the new feature …

A Weekend Full of Quality Time With PlayStation 3 — Howard Stringer, you have a problem. Your company's new video game system just isn't that great. — Ever since Mr. Stringer took the helm last year at Sony, the struggling if still formidable electronics giant, the world has been hearing …

Study: iPod video yet to play big — Nielsen Media Research has begun gathering its first data on the audience for Apple's iPod, calling into question the popularity of its video offering. — Owners of Apple's ubiquitous portable media device spend far more time on it listening to music …

Yes, there is an Office 2007 'kill switch' — Buried in a Knowledge Base article that Microsoft published to the Web on November 14 are details of Microsoft's plans to combat Office 2007 piracy via new Office Genuine Advantage lockdowns. — When asked last month whether Microsoft was planning …

Open Letter to the Community from Novell — On November 2, Novell and Microsoft announced a significant, multi-part agreement to work together to improve the interoperability between Linux and Windows and for Microsoft to redistribute more than 350,000 subscriptions for SUSE Linux Enterprise …

Beneath the Metadata — Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy — Associate Professor / Information Resources Specialist — Montana State University <elainep@montana.edu> — Background — People have been trying to classify and organize information for thousands of years.

Marc Benioff browbeat Journal brass — The Salesforce.com CEO was so outraged by a Wall Street Journal investigation into his mansion in Hawaii, that he had the reporter arrested and flew to New York to browbeat senior management at the newspaper, Valleywag's learned.

Netscape: the Calacanis effect — Jason Calacanis said, last week, that he was leaving AOL because Jonathan Miller, AOL's ousted CEO, was one of the only business mentors he'd ever had. Loyal, touching, but maybe also rather opportunistic. Valleywag has obtained the internal traffic stats …

Can Yahoo! and Local Papers Save Each Other? — Yahoo! announced this morning a partnership with a number of large newspaper chains, controlling a total of 176 publications, to share content and functionality. Both Yahoo! and local papers around the US are in a state of crisis …

Music labels lose MP3 search case — China's leading web search engine has been cleared of copyright infringement by a Beijing court. — Baidu.com faced a lawsuit from music companies after posting links to sites offering illegal music downloads. — But the ruling said the service …

'Worm' attacks Second Life world — Virtual world Second Life had to close its doors for a short time on Sunday after a worm attack called grey goo. — The self-replicating worm planted spinning gold rings around the virtual world, which is inhabited by more than a million users.

The Significance of Threadless.com — One of the recurring themes on the O'Reilly Radar is that of "news from the future," the idea that, as William Gibson put it, "The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet." We look for events and people that give us signals about what is to come.

'Tis the season to send spam — In addition to plenty of turkey, a record amount of spam will be served up this holiday season. — Mass e-mailers traditionally bump up their activity as the year winds down. But this year, the amount of junk messages could be unprecedented, companies that make spam-busting tools say.